Share this:

William D. Phillips - Facts

Affiliation at the time of the award:National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

Prize motivation: "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light"

Field: atomic physics

Prize share: 1/3

Work

At room temperature atoms and molecules in the air move about at breakneck speed. In order for them to be studied, they need to be slowed down or chilled. During the 1980s William Phillips, Steven Chu, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji developed different methods for this. When atoms come in contact with light particles with fixed energies, photons, their movement is affected as if they had been bumped. With the aid of laser light from different directions and adjustment of the photon's energy for Doppler effects, the atoms can be cooled to extremely low temperatures and captured in a trap.